“Doctor, will you please send the medicine have looked into the throat and it is red.”
Stomach: With the stomach symptoms what an anxious patient we have! The pains are dreadful.
Burning pains, tearing pains, with anxiety, with restlessness, with fever, coming on from taking cold – not from overeating, but from taking cold, which has settled in the stomach; from exposure to an ice bath, or in a very hot summer from intense heat, associated with an irritable brain in vigorous children.
Vomiting and retching, tearing, as it were, the very inside out by the awful retching. The vomiting of blood, bright red blood.
This is descriptive of the general stomach trouble. During this febrile state he craves bitter things, wine and beer, and brandy, but they will come up as soon as they reach the stomach.
He craves pungent things, nothing tastes bitter enough.
“If he could only get something bitter.” And yet his food tastes bitter, everything he eats tastes bitter, everything except water.
The word in the text is a clinical word; it says “gastric catarrhs.”
It is a very sharp, acute inflammation of the stomach. Retching, vomiting, of bile, vomiting of blood. Ineffectual urging to vomit, when there is nothing in the stomach.
With it there will be anxiety, restlessness, fear of death. The fear depicted upon the countenance makes an awful expression.
Aconite is a useful medicine in inflammation of the liver, when it comes suddenly. It is not very useful in repeated attacks, but in the first attack.
Liver: Violent inflammation of the liver, with violent tearing pains and much burning. Then comes the restlessness, the awful tortures of anxiety, moving constantly, fear of death, red face, glassy eyes, great thirst.
“Anxious restlessness” covers nearly all of these things.
Abdomen: In the abdomen there are shooting pains, burning, stinging pains, after exposure to cold, becoming chilled.
We will soon come to think that it does not make much difference where the disorder occurs, we must have the Aconite patient.
We also have inflammatory troubles of all the viscera of the abdomen. It may be a violent catarrhal inflammation. It may be a catarrhal condition of the lower portion of the colon, or a catarrhal condition of the rectum, when we will have a dysentery.
In dysentery, that which is found in the commode is almost pure blood, blood and a little slime. It seems impossible for him to leave the commode.
Vomiting a little blood and passing bloody mucus from the rectum. Always they will predict they will die tonight, or in a few hours. They look as if they realized the sensation of death.
The whole body is in a state of anguish, but the tenesmus and cramp, the urging to stool are simply terrible. It has a watery diarrhea, but that is not a very important symptom, although it is doubly marked in Hering.
But when pure blood is passed, and mucus, with tenesmus, or when a little green mucus is passed by infants with summer troubles, pure blood or grass-green discharges with fever coming on suddenly, in bright, rosy little ones, think of Aconite.
Most of the bowel troubles come on from intense heat, in the children. The infant takes on inflammation of the liver from the heat, and the stool becomes white like milk, of putty consistency. The child becomes yellow and screams with pain.
Urinary organs: It is useful in urinary troubles, bladder and kidney troubles. inflammatory conditions, and with bloody urine.
Scanty urine, suppressed urine, or retained urine. Retention from shock. This retention from shock makes it one of our best remedies for retention in the new-born.
The infant just born into the world has undergone a shock.
At your next visit the nurse says,
“The child has not passed urine.”
The functions of that little one are not yet established, because of the great shock the little one has gone through.
Inflammation of the bladder, with cutting, tearing pains. Burning pains with burning urine. Urine is hot, dark, colored red; red and clear, or bloody.
Retention from cold, especially in children, with crying and restlessness. With inflammatory conditions of the bladder, either in adults or in infants, there will be all the mental states representing the Aconite patient.
Genital: Aconite cures most violent cases of orchitis, which come on suddenly.
Orchitis from cold, from being chilled, in plethoric men. But in the common orchitis from suppressed gonorrhoeal discharges Aconite is useless.
The woman is a natural Aconite patient, with her sympathetic natural sensitiveness. She usually takes on complaints from nervous shock, from fear, and she naturally takes on complaints from causes other than those from which men take on sickness.
It is very seldom that fear will give a man inflammation, but fear is a common cause of inflammation of the uterus, and of the ovaries, in plethoric, vigorous, excitable women.
Fear will often cause abortion, but when Aconite is given early enough it will check the abortion that comes from fear.
We will have the stitching, burning, tearing pains of Aconite sometimes following fear or sudden emotion.
Sometimes a pregnant woman will say,
“Doctor, there is no use your planning for my confinement.
I know I am going to die in that confinement.”
If there is any one thing that is a really strong symptom to prescribe on it is that, A dose of Aconite, and then change the subject, she goes away, and in a few days you ask her about that fear and she says, “Oh, never mind that.”
Many little things like that can be singled out. But that state of fear is a very peculiar thing, and really represents the whole nature and being of the woman.
She predicts the day of her death. The reason that Aconite is so often the infant’s remedy is because the infant is so often made sick from fright.
“Inflammation of the genitals in plethoric women.”
Aconite is more frequently indicated in women and children than in men. Sensitive, vigorous, excitable women.
It is indicated in men in inflammatory conditions from becoming chilled in dry, cold air, and it is wonderful how you can convince a patient who needs Aconite what wonderful things there are in Homoeopathy by showing him how rapidly, with Aconite, you can put him in a sweat and break up a sharp fever when that is a recent and single attack.
“After tedious and difficult parturition.
Violent after-pains.
Shooting, tearing after-pains, with febrile conditions.”
Uterine haemorrhage with bright red blood and fear of death. It is wonderful what Aconite will do in some cases arising from taking cold in the puerperal state, but do not mix that up with puerperal fever.
The first is a simple form, non-septic; perhaps the breast is involved, with soreness in the breast, suppression of the milk and febrile conditions; but if there is suppression of the lochia do not give Aconite.
New-born children, with difficulty of breathing, after the use of forceps, or from a tedious labor; the child is breathless, there is difficulty with the heart, and in a few hours fever comes on. Aconite is a very simple remedy.
The retention of urine in the infant is so commonly an Aconite condition that you will hardly ever need to use any other medicine.
The little one cannot yet talk, it cannot manifest very much, and, to a certain extent, the practitioner is compelled to be somewhat routine in these affairs, and the routine practitioners have been more or less successful with Aconite for the retention of the urine. Again, it is true that in many cases, of retention of the urine in the mother, it will disappear after a dose of Causticum.
Throat: Aconite is a great routine croup remedy, one that is misused; but it is indicated in all those cases of croup which come on suddenly in plethoric children, from exposure to dry, cold wind, having been out in the cold wind with the mother during the day.
The child is put to bed and rouses up from the first sleep, perhaps at 9 or 10 or 11 o’clock, grasps the throat, coughs violently, a croupy, choking cough, with hoarse bark.
Hardly any other remedy can correspond to that rapidity of action, taking cold in the daytime and developing itself so suddenly.
Croup that comes on from exposure today, and does not develop until tomorrow morning or tomorrow evening, may correspond to quite a number of other remedies but especially Hepar, which is slower in its pace.
And it is more suitable in children somewhat run down and subject to frequent attacks of croup.
Spongia is also similar, but it lacks many of the elements more likely to occur in run-down children, those always taking cold.
It would be a difficult matter to distinguish between the appearance of the Aconite and the Spongia croup so far as the croup is concerned, because both have all the anxious appearance found in croup.
The Aconite croup is a violent croup, inflammation of the larynx, and, at the same time, spasms of the larynx, coming on with great rapidity.
The Spongia croup is less inflammatory, the inflammation grows with the spasms; but while Spongia may rouse up at 11 o’clock at night, suffocating and choking, it has not the intense febrile excitement that belongs to Aconite, nor the anguish, although it has all the dryness that is found in Aconite.
In 1881, Kent accepted a position as professor of anatomy at the Homeopathic College of Missouri, an institution with which he remained affiliated until 1888. In 1890, Kent moved to Pennsylvania to take a position as Dean of Professors at the Post-Graduate Homeopathic Medical School of Philadelphia. In 1897 Kent published his magnum opus, Repertory of the Homœopathic Materia Medica. Kent moved to Chicago in 1903, where he taught at Hahnemann Medical College.
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